Birch and Wolman are on the wrong side of history, and #Bitcoin makes their naive, immoral positions moot #payments

There are two separate arguments here and I’m not sure it makes sense to deal with them together so one day to say about the “cash and the poor” argument is that study after study, survey after survey, experience after experience shows unequivocally that people who are forced to exist in a cash environment suffer higher transaction costs than those who do not. If you have some evidence to the contrary from a reputable source then I will be genuinely interested to see it because this is a really important area of public policy. But let us put that to one side for a moment. The real issue here is whether the difference between privacy and anonymity is semantic or not. There’s too much here to put in a magazine comment, so I will sit down and put together a proper blog post about this soon. To me, however, the crucial point is precisely David’s point of civil society. If I di...